The little girl stretched herself out alongside the man and said, “Hello Mister.” He said “Hello” and wondered what would happen next. The girl was dressed in an oversized tattered green hand-me-down bathing suit and you could see by the blue of her lips that she had probably been in the water all afternoon. Her thin little body was shaking and he offered her his towel. She politely took it, dried herself and said, “Thanks Mister.” She then began to look at him as though she had known him for a long time. The little girl had that curious grown-up, knowing air about her that made one feel as though one were talking to an adult.
“Will you take me into the deep water? I can’t swim. Will you take me into the deep water?” He got up from the hard cement and they both walked toward the pool. He jumped into the water first and then she shouted, “Hold up your hands. I’ll jump into your arms!” She jumped and splashed water into his face and then climbed on his back. He carried her off into the deep water while she squealed with delight and looked around for her friends so that she could show off.
Much later, after repeated trips around the pool, she said to him, “I have to go home now Mister, are you going home?” He decided to leave the pool. It was already past five.
“I’ll meet you outside,” she shouted and then disappeared into the women’s dressing room.
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He didn’t recognize her at first when he saw her coming up to him, an old dirty cotton dress covering her body, her hair in wet streaks, her face bright and shiny. They walked along, asking questions of one another.
She was a little Irish girl named Nora Delly and she lived on the Hudson River waterfront, on Greenwich Street, a few blocks from the Carmine Street swimming pool. She lived in a four-room cold-water flat and hated it because her mother had to heat the stove for hot water and the place was always too cold or too hot.
They passed an ice-cream wagon and he treated her to an ice-cream pie. She left him on Seventh Avenue with the promise to look for him whenever she came to the pool.
All during that summer he used to meet her in the pool and take her for long rides into the deep water. She introduced him to her friends and he soon became a celebrated person at the pool. Whenever he would come to the pool, the kids would crowd around him fighting for the privilege of riding on his back into the five-feet water.
One day he decided to invite a half dozen of them to his room for some ice cream and cookies. That was the beginning of a pattern that was to remain for a very long time. Nora enjoyed herself tremendously at these parties and played hostess for him, deciding how much each kid should eat and how long they should stay. Once a week, perhaps only once a month and sometimes on Sunday afternoon, the kids would knock on his door and come in to muss up his papers, look at his books and peck away on the typewriter. He began to hear their conversation now. What had once been innocent babble now took order and form and he could understand the logic of their ideas. They all attended parochial school and attacked Protestantism with the same bitterness that they denounced their teachers. The more he heard Nora talk and some of the others, the more he began to be nervous about himself. He saw that these kids, the oldest of them only ten, had a vocabulary of definite opinions and many of their inculcated ideas were quite opposed to his own. He became afraid of saying certain things and the buoyant feeling he had felt all summer disappeared.
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His difficulty was simple enough. He was Jewish and he was afraid that one day one of them would make some remark and he would be forced to take a position and he wasn’t quite certain what he would say. And so whenever the children spoke, he listened in dread and wondered what fleeting innocent stream of conversation would suddenly turn on him and force him to take a stand. He felt that he was caught up in a humiliating situation and he often wondered how the consciousness of this idea arose in his mind. He didn’t feel particularly Jewish and he saw no reason why he should be so disturbed over the possibility of an incident. He used to lie awake in the late evening and think about the pleasant afternoons at the swimming pool and the kids fighting to ride on his back and the noisy parties with ice cream and cake. He remembered how pleased he had felt when he told himself that he was giving these Irish kids a break, taking them out of their dismal cold-water flats, exposing them to kindness, to culture, to afternoons surrounded by objects they could never see in their own homes. He felt that since he had treated them kindly, taught them how to swim and peck away at a typewriter, they would forget he was Jewish and if ever a damning phrase would form itself on one of their lips, their conscience would immediately silence the insulting words and he would be free. He began to wonder how they talked among themselves and if they ever discussed him. He would have given anything to overhear some of their conversations. But then there is something mysterious about other people’s conversations and we never seem to hear them. In a whole lifetime we may only overhear one or two references to ourselves—and then it comes as a rude or pleasant shock. Almost as though we were moving through a museum and then suddenly at the end of a long corridor we came face to face with our own portrait. But what could they say? Could they call him “that lousy Jew”—“that Christ-killer”—but then why would they come back and why would they sit on his chairs and watch their feet?
One day Nora said to him, “Mama asks why you don’t come up and visit us. I’ve told her about you.”
He didn’t want to go to Nora’s house. And he knew the reason why. If the children hadn’t been able to see through him, then the mother certainly would. And then his Jewishness would be on display. But he knew that he had to go and they set the time for the next Friday evening.
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The building Nora lived in was as ugly as the rest of the tenements on Greenwich Street. He knocked on the door and Mrs. Delly answered. “Come in, come in, we’ve been expecting you.”
He sat down in an oversized chair. The room was drab, ordinary. The oil stove gave off a curious odor. The conversation began with housing. All of the time that they sat discussing the housing situation in the neighborhood, Nora sat crosslegged on the couch looking at her friend, looking at her mother, glad that the fencing was over and her friend was able to talk to her mother.
Mrs. Delly shifted her heavy body and then motioned Nora and her friend into the kitchen. The three of them sat down to a cup of tea. And then the fear hit him. The lights in the kitchen were bright. She could get a good look at him. She would see that he was Jewish. And then she would begin to say, what did you say your name was, yes, that isn’t a Catholic name, is it, what kind of a name is that now? And he would be forced to say, that’s a Jewish name. I’m Jewish. As though being Jewish was the most terrible fact of existence.
He couldn’t control his tea cup and some of the hot water spilled on his jacket. Nora immediately fetched a towel. “That’s a shame,” Mrs. Delly said, “but don’t worry, it won’t stain.” He tried to think of something to say. He felt a terrible silence. Nora came to his rescue.
“Did you see our white kitty? We keep him to kill mice. He killed three mice last week.”
“Now Nora, don’t be talking to your friend about mice while we’re sitting and drinking our tea. What was it you said you were studying at school?”
He knew now that there was no escape for him. She had guessed that he was Jewish. The question about school was only an attempt to link his Jewishness with a particular subject. He thought of telling her that he was studying to be a radio mechanic. But he couldn’t and blurted out the truth. He was studying to be a teacher. Mrs. Delly nodded her head and he could see that she was beginning to tie up her thoughts.
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“It’s good that you have the patience to want to study. So many people can’t wait and they get themselves jobs that lead to nothing. My Tommy could have been a refrigerator mechanic instead of breaking his back on the water-front.”
He sipped on his tea and nodded in agreement.
“You’re not a Catholic boy, are you?” she suddenly asked. “Nora has been telling me for months about a nice man that she met at the swimming pool and she thought he was Jewish. I thought I’d ask you.”
He felt himself go limp. A humiliating flush that he couldn’t control swept over his face. He saw Nora staring at him with a puzzled look in her eyes. And then he could feel stirring deep within him the necessity of a retort—a defense of his position phrased in the language of the long struggle for the dignity of the individual, for the brotherhood of man, for the rights of all people—a speech that would go beyond the insult he had felt at the lips of Mrs. Delly, and unite him and Mrs. Delly and Nora into one great bond.
He placed his cup of tea down on the table. “I could never drink hot tea,” he said apologetically. “It always chokes up on me.”
“Oh that’s a pity!” said Mrs. Delly. “Why didn’t you say so before? Nora fetch your friend a botde of cold beer from the ice box. How’ll that be?”
Nora walked over to the ice box in the far comer of the kitchen. She wondered why her friend had flushed so. She had never seen him so upset. Once he had raised his voice when Molly Donovan had spilled some ink on one of his books. Could it have been something that her mother had said?
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